Arnoud S. Q. Visser, "On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Feb 2, 2026

Arnoud S. Q. Visser, professor of textual culture and director of the Huizinga Institute, explores 2,500 years of intellectual irritation. He traces pedantry from Socrates and sophists through Renaissance schoolmasters to modern culture wars. Short, lively takes examine satire, education, gendered tropes, and how displays of learning became a social and political weapon.

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INSIGHT

Pedantry Defined By Social Irritation

Pedantry is the perception of an excessive use or display of learning that evokes irritation.
Arnoud Visser shows this irritation appears already in classical Athens toward sophists and Socrates.

INSIGHT

Behavior Precedes The Label

The label 'pedant' didn't exist in antiquity but the behavior did, showing the phenomenon predates the word.
Visser traces how satirical responses to perceived excessive learning led to real social danger, like Socrates' execution.

ANECDOTE

Origin Story Of 'Pedant' In Italy

The term 'pedant' began in 15th-century Italian as a neutral word for a Latin teacher.
It gained negative meaning in the 16th century, becoming a stock comic character: the scruffy, incompetent schoolmaster.

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A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton University Press, 2025) offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates. Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought. Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe.

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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